Saturday, December 14, 2013

The semester has come to an end here at Friends University, and students are leaving campus for their holiday break. Right now I'm grading, and while I have many tests to grade, none interest me quite as much as the exams turned in for "Simplicity and Sustainability" course which I taught for the second time this semester. I gave my students questions on the readings we've discussed--the writings of E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly and John Cobb, and many others--but more importantly, I asked them to go beyond the questions, and use the essay portions of the exam to reflect upon alternative forms of social and economic organization. That was the focus on the course, after all--to consider, criticize, and comment upon the range of possibilities available to those who truly wish to make their livelihoods, their lifestyles, and their neighborhoods both simpler (meaning, most essentially, more readily available to and responsive to their own collective efforts, rather being dependent upon inaccessible systems beyond their reach) and more sustainable (that is, less exploitative of the resources, both human and natural, upon which all communities are built). That such possibilities are available is the primary reason why I teach this course, as well as try to bring similar insights into as manydifferentclasses I teach as possible. While I love taking students out to visit local farmers and producers (as the above sign, kindly provided by Phil and Lucy Nisly, one of the great localists I've gotten to know here in south-central Kansas, plainly shows)--some alternatives are much closer (both in distance, and in terms of social and economic change) than that.

Early in the semester, I stopped by the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and spent a while familiarizing myself with some of the work which this decade-old organization--a non-profit corporation which works with local businesses, developers, and government agencies, using money raised through a mutual improvement district which all the downtown business pay into--thinks about making a mid-sized city like Wichita more sustainable. There's actually been a fair amount of activity on this front; Wichita, KS, was chosen as one of the cities which the Urban Sustainability Accelerator, a program at Portland State University, would focus on turning 2013-2014, with plans to bring together various actors to get ideas (and funds) generated to push forward more green and more localized development in some key parts of our city. This led, in turn, to city planners and transportation experts from various local organizations and government agencies to visit the class, and lay out what concerns them most. Some major worries: include that cities like Wichita--like too many other mid-sized cities--suffer from an inferiority complex of sorts, such that home developers can almost always count on city officials to throw in "special assessments" to lure home developers to expand their footprint and keep housing costs relatively low; that the expansive footprint of the city contributes to an overemphasis on continually develop and expand our primarily roadways, assuming that such suburbanization is the only viable model for holding on to our labor pool, thus making it ever harder to push the city itself in the direction of bicycling, walkability, or mass transit; and that, for all these reasons (not to mention several that are probably somewhat particular to the political culture of this part of Kansas), the very word "sustainability" moves even non-Tea Party types to immediately think in hysterical terms of socialist government planning, rampaging secularism, and the United Nations taking over the country. So some other term is necessary to clear the air (I'm told that folks down in Waco, TX, dealing with similar paranoid resistance to citizens organizing themselves to promote local goods through planning, have come to speak solely of "stewardship" or "creation care." Whatever works, I guess.)

When looking at moving such a large entity--and of course, the largeness of even a city like Wichita depends upon one's frame of reference--as Wichita in a "simplifying" direction, you need to begin from below, as well as above. And so we also continued the on-again, off-again conversation which we've had here at Friends for a while about a community garden. Rebecca McMahon--whose expertise as a county extension agent is hardly elitist, but rather very much part of the effort to get all of us more engaged in our own food supply--made two visits to Friends University, to talk with us about various strategies. With the input of the nearby Northfield School, and the example of some other local gardeners, with any luck a few of us, students and staff and faculty, are moving towards adding a small but sustainable contributor to Friends University's local ecosystem--and giving our local community greater opportunity to get back to the earth at the same time.

If there was any single overriding theme to our class this semester, it was the question of scale--whether working from the bottom or the top, we have to be able to think clearly about what is about the social and economic organizations that we focused upon which we wanted to simplify, or make more sustainable. When is tending to the local the proper route to take, and when is taking broad and radical stands? And can you do both at once? Bill McKibben, the famed environmentalist, author, and challenger of our all-growth-all-the-time economy, argues in his latest book that you can. As for myself, I'm not sure--though it may be that, in out globalized world, you can't effectively choose not to. Certainly that was the point McKibben made when he visited Watermark Books here in Wichita this semester--the local (in his case, learning to keep bees) has been utterly changed by national and international forces rampaging across the planet, and so nothing less than equally broad and radical actions--which McKibben, a retiring and bookish person at heart, has found himself spearheading through his 350.Org campaign--are called for. I and several of my students went to hear him speak, and I can't deny: he's a persuasive man, who wants people to understand that we need to simplify and scale back the entire global oil economy, if we want to keep our communities sustainable in the long run.

McKibben probably isn't wrong--but neither is his radicalism particularly hopeful, or joyful. And what is the point of living a life that is more local and more truly one's own, if such simplification doesn't bring any more joy and contentment into your life? Which is why I was grateful, once again, to be able to make use of the wisdom and generosity of multiple farmers and producers near Wichita, most especially the Hershberger family, Leroy and his parents, who have opened up their home multiple times to these "Local Food Tours" that I organize. The comfort, pride, and love that they have for their particular place--the farmland of Reno County, and the Amish, Mennonite, and other Christian folk that have grown up in (or have left and then later returned) to that place to work the land and trade with and teach one another--is reflected in their language, their families, the attachments, and not least their food. (Who knew that butternut squash pie could taste so fine? I certainly didn't.) Repeatedly through our tour that day, we were taught, by word and by example, that the quest for greater personal and collective responsibility over those things which are most properly one's own--food, shelter, family, livelihood, community, and so forth--is one which requires constant "tendance," to use a term which the political theorist Sheldon Wolin developed long ago: one must become deeply familiar with, and committed to, ones limits, and think about what needs to be done in accordance with them. How to make use of this land? How best to raise these chickens? How can I adapt to specializing in a different crop? How can I pass this down to my children, and their children after them? How can I prevent myself, as I make decisions about schooling and budgeting and my faith life, from being "encumbered" by this world? This requires time, memory, and affection. Wendell Berry calls it "local knowledge," and the people who we visited, particularly the Hershbergers, clearly had it in spades. It is unlikely that anyone who takes seriously a more or less agrarian way of life can truly be without such. And yet, for all the legitimate reasons we might have to be suspicious of ever-expanding and ever-complicating logic of urban life, it would be wrong to say that city planners and gardening experts and transportation designers that visited my class were without such knowledge as well. True, they may not have been deeply focused on building an alternative form of social and economic organization, but they surely did have an often quite intimate grasp of the urban and environmental issue which face Wichita's residents, one that can only come from tending to a place--and as such, they may well be capable of asking the sorts of questions about sustainability and scale that, I think at least (and hopefully at least some of my class thinks as well), need to be asked.

The great problem which always faces any attempt to talk about--much less teach a class about!--how recognizing psychological, economic, and environmental limits may enable us to think less technologically, and more holistically, about slowing down and simplifying and making ours a more sustainable way of life, is the tendency to want more than "tendance" as a support for our efforts. More than "merely" tending to one's garden, we wish to deal with the larger threats to said garden. And we need to! But of course, any departure from our place to addressing larger issues is inevitably reductive of the place we've left--and reductivity is exactly the wrong kind of simplicity that we should seek. Real local, sustainable knowledge is diverse and changing, like the natural world: its simplicity comes in our structuring our lives and vocations to be near it, not in methodological homogenizing of it from afar. There is no simple answer here--real simplicity, the kind that can make for a more secure and joyful life, remains a pretty complicated affair. I'm grateful, though, that some continue to seek it--and by so doing, help me and my student learn more about the choices that we face, in an ever-more pressing fashion, each and every day.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."